In a message dated 5/23/00 9:56:02 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
writes:
<< I blow hot and cold on the usefulness of the term "dialectical
materialism,"
but even when I warm to it I don't like to see it posited as *the*
philosophical
basis for "historical materialism."
Even apart from the specific expressions, I'm with Carrol on this one. (Not
quite a first, but close, eh, Carrol?) A credible case can be made that Marx
consciously rehjected philosophy and philosophical bases, regarding them as
mere ideology, and saw the materialist concetion of history as a partial
substitute, preserving what might be valuable in philosophy while explaining
why it was ideology. See Daniel Brudney's excellent recent book, Marx's
Attempt to Escape Philosophy. One might debate, of courese, how successful
was Marx's attempt to escape philosophy.
Btw Engels, who is also responsible to a lot of what is called materialist
dialectics as philosophy, with a certain degree of approval by and even
participation from Marx, who contributed a chapter to Anti-Duehring, takes
the Brudney line in a manner os speaking in his piece Ludwif Fuerback and the
End of Classical German Philosophy.
>Of the latter: (a) independently of its
origins, it has achieved a respectable pedigree and I think a useful and
essentially accurate label for the mode of thought which I see first
developed
with any precision in *Poverty of Philosophy*; and (b) most of what I
would think of as historical materialism can be defended independently of
any particular view (pro or con or neutral) of the "dialectics of nature."
Quite right. historical materialism, construed as a view about the centrality
of class and the economy in social explanation, is consistent with any
ontological view--including Machean or Berkeleyan idealism, as the
Empiocritics pilloried by Lenin argued--are none.
> (Stephen Gould, hardly a "dogmatic Marxist," has however written
favorably of the influence of conscious dialectics, even of the Soviet
type, on biological thinking.) >>
Right, but he is not talking about historical materialism, rather more a
diamat sort of thing. See here also Lewontin, Rose, & Kaim, The Dialectical
Biologist, my least favorite Lewontin book.
--jks
